Here and Now

Weekdays 12-3 PM

Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it’s happening in the middle of the day, with timely, smart and in-depth news, interviews and conversation.

Co-hosted by award-winning journalists Robin Young and Jeremy Hobson, the show’s daily lineup includes interviews with newsmakers, NPR reporters, editors and bloggers, innovators and artists from across the U.S. and around the globe.

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A potentially unprecedented conflict is unfolding in Pennsylvania’s state House of Representatives. After allegations of abuse, one Republican lawmaker has been granted a restraining order against another.

But WITF’s Katie Meyer reports the accused representative is still allowed in the state Capitol.

Almost every day, there’s at least one story in the news that involves racism, sexism or another kind of bigotry. But when you hear those stories, do you think, “Well, that’s not me”? Turns out, even among the best-intentioned people, unconscious biases can exist.

So how can we identify these biases, and is it possible to overcome them?

Washington may soon become the first state to restrict a certain kind of chemicals found in products from food wrappers to fire-fighting foams. The chemicals are used because they’re non-stick and flame-resistant — but they’ve also been associated with liver problems, weakened immune systems and certain kinds of cancer.

Sigrid Nuñez‘s new novel “The Friend” is about a lot of things — the suicide of a friend which will never be explained, the writing world and, at one point, sex trafficking. But most of all, it’s about a Harlequin Great Dane, white with black patches, named Apollo.

After her friend’s suicide, the book’s narrator — a cat person — is asked to take his massive pet in. They mourn together.

A deliberate act, that’s how Scotland Yard is describing the poisoning of a former Russian intelligence officer and his daughter in the southern English city of Salisbury on Sunday. Investigators will not say exactly what toxin was used, only that it was a nerve agent.

Students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School will gather later this month to call for gun measures after the shooting at their school that left 17 dead. It’s a political youth movement with echoes of the past, including the 1960s Berkeley protests and the 1903 Children’s Crusade.

The Academy Awards are this weekend, and while the provocative, uncompromising German filmmaker Werner Herzog isn’t up for an Oscar, critics and cinephiles alike have long ranked him high among the living masters of cinema.

Before legendary French filmmaker François Truffaut died in 1984, he called Herzog “the most important film director alive.”

Wednesday marks the end of Black History Month, and we have a story that begins at the end of the Civil War in 1865. Four million African-American slaves were emancipated. In the chaos following war, where would they go? How would they reunite with family?

In 2016, more than 20 percent of homeless people over age 50 were living in shelters, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And that figure doesn’t include people living on the streets.

There have been thousands of spills from oil and gas pipelines in the U.S. over the past decade. When the Keystone XL, or any big transmission line, spills, it gets attention from the federal government and the public.

But in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, thousands of miles of smaller pipelines are being built, connecting drilling well pads to the larger energy distribution system.

It wasn’t that long ago that the things we heard on air — through speakers, through headphones — were recorded, edited and played back on magnetic tape, reel to reel, and later on cassettes. But, today, sound recording has totally changed and tape technology has all but been abandoned. Or, so one would think.